All But One Washington State Insurer To Hike Premiums

Washington state has just one insurer proposing to lower its premium rates for 2015, after the smaller company offered some of the highest rates in the state exchange this year. Most premiums will be raised anywhere from 0.6 to 26 percent.

Filing a 6.8% decrease, Molina Healthcare, is the only insurance company in Washington to offer a decrease. But Molina, which covered just 1,200 members in 2014, offered some of the highest premiums in the Washington Obamacare exchange, the Wall Street Journal reports.

Yet Time Insurance Company, which covers a similar number of people, is looking to up premiums by 26 percent. Insurers that priced their premiums overly high in 2014 out of caution over joining the risky Obamacare exchanges may choose to lower their drastically higher premiums, like Molina. But it’s not clear whether bigger insurers which priced their 2014 plans more competitively will be able to lower their prices as well.

“With hindsight and looking at what’s going on across the country…we’ve improved those assumptions and lowered our rates in 2015,” Molina vice president Ben Lyman told the Wall Street Journal.

Washington insurers proposed premium hikes ranging from 0.57 percent, from Kaiser Foundation Health Plan of the Northwest to 14.2 percent from Group Health Options, which sells only off-exchange plans. Kaiser Foundation Health Plan’s Mid-Atlantic branch proposed a slightly higher hike of 3.3 percent on average in Virginia, which boasted a less highly regulated insurance market than Washington state.

Molina expects its annual medical costs to increase just 2 percent in 2015, while Group Health Options, which proposed the largest hike, expected annual costs to rise by 8.6 percent.

Still folks, that’s too high for most people to be able to afford on top of the co pays and higher deductibles.

The regulation-heavy environment has already raised its head in Washington even after Obamacare’s implementation. After backlash against the narrow provider networks that have become a hallmark of the health care law, Washington’s insurance commissioner issued a rule in April to dictate just how narrow insurers will be allowed to go.

Insurance companies warned that given Obamacare’s requirements to provide a bevy of services to each and every customer, regardless of their wishes, their only choice to control costs if narrower networks are banned would be to raise premiums.

But Washington’s insurance commissioner Mike Kreidler approved the rule just two weeks ago, leaving insurers with little time to consider their options before submitting their 2015 rates.

Stephanie Marquis, a spokeswoman for the state insurance office, emphasized that insurers have just several months of claims data to go on for their proposals and had to use other means of justifying rate increases, again complicating the review process for proposals.